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One way to end debt: hit the brakes and do nothing

Here’s an easy way for Congress to cut $6 trillion in debt: Do nothing.

If they can merely continue to fight, fuss and fail in the manner of the debt-cutting Super Committee, the debt will start going away. How? Well, thanks to their past shenanigans, our representatives in Washington, D.C., have set mechanisms in place that would both slash spending and raise taxes automatically.

Though last summer’s battle over raising the debt ceiling was a reckless exercise in economic brinksmanship, it did end with a deal to cut $1 trillion from the budget. The deal also set up the Super Committee that was supposed to be motivated by a deadline after which another $1.2 trillion in cuts would start kicking in. Since, the committee failed miserably, those reductions are ready to go.

Then, if Congress fails to act by the end of the year, huge tax cuts put in place as “temporary” in George W. Bush’s first term will expire. That would pay off another $4 trillion of the debt.

The grand total for doing nothing at all: more than $6 trillion in savings.

Sounds great, right? Well, yes, if debt reduction is truly the most important task facing the American government. Plenty of Tea party folks and conservative pundits insist that it is. (Of course, they don’t really mean it – not if it includes raising taxes and big reductions in defense spending.)

On the liberal side, such aggressive debt reduction has never been popular. Democrats argue that deep spending cuts should wait until the economy rebounds. It is more important that the federal government have money to pump into the economy, kick start business activity and create jobs. For the same reason, if there were a sudden windfall of new revenue through the extinction of the Bush tax cuts, Democrats would not want to see it all go to pay the country’s bills.

So, obviously, liberals do not like the meat ax that is about to hit the budget – the automatic, across-the-board cuts that were supposed to prod the Super Committee into a compromise plan. One example of the problem created by those automatic cuts can be found in the funding of our National Parks. According to Craig Obey, a spokesman for the National Parks Conservation Association, a study commissioned by his group revealed that “every federal dollar invested in national parks generates at least fourdollars of economic value to the public. National parks support $13.3 billion of local private-sector economic activity and 267,000 private-sector jobs.”

In other words, arbitrary reductions in the parks budget could kill jobs and economic activity. The same is true for many other federal programs. This is not a smart thing to do in the middle of hard economic times, Democrats contend.

For their part, Republicans – citing the alarm being raised by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta – say big reductions in money for the military would be dangerous in a time of multiple challenges to national security.

And neither Republicans nor Democrats want to allow taxes to be raised on the middle class at the start of an election year.

For those reasons and more, it is hard to see how the $6 trillion do-nothing option would be allowed to happen. The mechanisms that would create the big cuts and new revenues were political ploys, not serious policy decisions. Almost certainly, a new set of tricks will be put in place to nix the old ones – that is, of course, if our “leaders” are able to agree on how to do it.

Given the level of dysfunction in Congress, it is not out of the realm of possibility that they might fail to squirm out of the box they have built for themselves — in which case, the joke’s on the voters who elected such a sorry assembly of ideologues, partisan hacks and ethically compromised tools of special interests.

Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate..